Until the last few months, I always felt about amateur wrestling sort of the way I did about the bureau of motor vehicles. I never wanted to spend a lot of time thinking about it, but I was glad it was there.

As a spectator sport, I never caught the bug -- partly because I never understood it, partly because its outward appearance doesn't lend itself to easy comprehension. You see a couple of guys locked in some sort of quivering pretzel configuration, it's hard to know what's going on and it's easy to look away.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge gestures during press conference today in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rogge said he will meet with leaders of international wrestling's governing body to discuss ways it can fight to save its place in the 2020 Olympic Games.AP/Laurent Gillieron

That doesn't mean I didn't respect the sport; I did. Any such 1-on-1 competition with the physical component of wrestling I knew had to be exhausting not to mention a true test of tenacity, fitness and technique. I just didn't have a lot of interest in watching it.

That is, not until my son began wrestling for his middle school varsity team in December. All of a sudden, I became a lot more interested. Which was a big running joke among a lot of guys in the office. Just about everyone in the Sports department has a functional working knowledge of the sport except me.

Wrestling is not a sport at which you dive in at age 13 with no experience and immediately succeed. My kid found that out. He won one match out of 14 in his just-completed season and that was at the JV level. In his 10 varsity matches at the highly competitive central weight class of 122 pounds, he was 0-10, regularly getting pinned by team captains, sometimes battling through two periods only to run out of gas in the third.

So often, his desire and conditioning just was not enough because his experience and expertise was lacking. Wrestling is a perfect synthesis of strength, balance, quickness and technique. If you're missing any of the components, you will be exploited by an experienced opponent.

As a father, I felt a lot of empathy for him. He was taking on a new sport that many of his competitors had spent half their young lives devoted to.

Devotion. That's what I took away from this season. So many of the people around this sport are immersed in it. So many good people. I've never seen an individual sport where the competitors so take care of each other emotionally.

It sucks to lose in any sport but doubly so in wrestling because it's just you out there. There's no blaming anyone else. The kids know this and they band together outside of the competition. You can see them talking and discussing strategy between matches even though they never actually compete with each other. It's not technically a team sport, yet it is.

Either you commit wholly to wrestling or you are lost. So, the people who persist in this sport are the ones who love it unconditionally.

And that's why it's so maddening, so abhorrent to see wrestling dropped from the Olympics. It really is the starkest example I have seen of politically and financially driven people clothed in suits trumping the purity of those covered in sweat.

One of my favorite sports movies has always been North Dallas Forty. It's more than 30 years old now but it still wears well because its theme is timeless -- the dominance of the cynical, corporate profiteer over the soulful, replaceable competitor.

An artist who performs for love of the form has always been vulnerable to those only involved in his art for profit, prestige or political gain. The composer whose work is stolen, altered and re-marketed. The writer whose earnest thoughts are co-opted by charlatans. The Renaissance painter who farms himself to the royal family.

And then, there is the athlete who would play his chosen game for nothing.

Fewer and fewer of those exist anymore, you could rightly argue. But some of the last of the breed are amateur wrestlers. Purer competitors you cannot find. And the Olympics Games are their quadrennial Super Bowl.

Their sport was one of the ancient Greek competitions in the original Olympics. When the modern Games were revived, it was there. And it's been a staple since, a magnet for seminal moments from Wilfried Dietrich to Dan Gable to Aleksandr Karelin. More than 40 years later, I still remember the astonishment at seeing Dietrich's suplex of 440-pound Chris Taylor, lifting him backward and up over his head.

But the International Olympic Committee, that most political of sport governing bodies, has some problems with wrestling. First, Americans are good at it. Second, the IOC can't make enough of a buck at it.

The Olympics were never intended to be a marketing idea when they were revived in 1896. A Frenchman named Pierre De Coubertin was mainly concerned about the flabby state of his countrymen and also was looking for some friendly international competition to promote peace.

But now, sports with judges and scorecards that translate more readily to dramatic video have begun hoarding more TV time. And television began driving the Olympic bus when NBC took the contract from ABC in 1992 and a toothy executive named Dick Ebersol turned the focus from competition to product.

Know why wrestling has barely a fraction of the prime-time coverage it did two or three decades ago? It doesn't attract female viewers. And they are a disproportionate sector of the Olympic audience, especially when compared to that of other major sporting events. That's also why we're being overloaded the last six Olympic cycles with gymnastics, swimming, diving and figure skating.

Wrestling isn't good at politics, either. It doesn't lobby the International Olympic Committee particularly well. It's not full of people eager to take meetings and make PowerPoint presentations.

And so, in spite of strength and tradition across the globe from the U.S. to Russia, from Japan to Iran, wrestling has very clearly been blindsided by Tuesday's IOC announcement. It was known that one Olympic event would be discarded for 2020. It was assumed by many that the event to be jettisoned would be the ridiculous modern pentathlon (fencing, swimming, equestrian, running and target riflery) an event so outdated that it was created to mirror the necessary skills of a 19th-century cavalry officer.

But pentathlon did have a lobbying presence. The sport actually made a full presentation to the IOC promoting its international appeal and youth movement. And the sport's creation is linked to that Frenchman who led the Olympics' very resurgence. Pentathlon has friends in high places.

Wrestling has mainly just its own. It is a sheltered community, understood in its passion only by itself. It does not have John Tesh writing new-age "essays" for it, only great old John Irving novels gathering bookshelf dust.

And that's really too bad. Because if there's one thing I've learned about wrestling this winter, it's how many good people surround it, how many involved are in it for nothing more than the sport. They contribute in time and sweat and expect no yield other than the fulfillment of knowing new generations are enjoying the sport they love so much.

That sort of emotional equation doesn't compute on the IOC's ledger. And so that future is in peril.

It makes you wish it was all as simple as someone like Cael Sanderson walking into the IOC's Switzerland headquarters and putting some twit in a triangle choke until he screams for mommy. If only it was.

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